LITTLE DELIA
Blind Willie McTell (edited by Richie from an on-line site)

Delia, Delia, how can it be?
You love that old rounder, but you don't love me
Well, that's one more rounder gone.

Delia, Delia sitting all around
Some of your old rounders gonna pay my way back home.
Well, that's one more rounder gone.

Sitting on the housetop, high as I can see.
You love that old rounder, but you don't love me.
Well, that's one more rounder gone.

Delia's poor mother took a trip out West
When she returned, Delia lyin' in rest.
Well, that's one more rounder gone.

Delia's mother wept, Delia's father moaned
They'd have wanted their poor child to die at home
Well, that's one more rounder gone.

Rubber tired buggy, two-seated hack,
took Delia to the graveyard, never brought her back
Well, that's one more rounder gone.

Kenny lookin' high, Kenny lookin' low,
Shot poor Delia with that hated .44.
Well, that's one more rounder gone.

Delia, Delia, wouldn't take no one's advice
Last words I heard her say were, "Jesus Christ!"
Well, that's one more rounder gone.

Judge said to Kenny, "Here's a natural fact:
you going to wait in jail till Delia come back"
Well, that's one more rounder gone.

Kenny's in the basement, drinking from a silver cup
Delia's in the graveyard, never come back up.
Well, that's one more rounder gone.

Kenny said to judge, "What's the fuss about?
Just that no good woman trying to put me out"
Well, that's one more rounder gone.

Blind Willie McTell
Born: May 05, 1901 in Thompson, Georgia
Died: Aug 19, 1959 in Milledgeville, Georgia

From an on-line site: The best example of McTell's dry-eyed empathy and focus on the telling detail may be "Little Delia". It's another ballad with a varied history, but here McTell's adaptation doesn't emphasize the narrative. Instead, he fractures it into a collection of vignettes rippling forwards and backwards from the central drop-in-the-bucket -- a verse is accidentally repeated without noticeable damage -- each principal and accessory given a piercing glance and passed by.

He changes the story's protagonists to professional lowlifes -- gamblers, "rounders" -- and then emphasizes their typicality, most insistently in the single-line chorus (that lyric form beloved of Yeats) "She's one more rounder gone." No one is granted dignity -- Delia's parents seem less upset by Delia's death than by her not having the decency to "die at home" -- and Delia herself is utterly disposable, only of interest to a court that, in turn, is only interested in punishing her unrepentant killer. But everyone is granted their given moment of fully-engaged attention, and in her very disposability Delia seems to drag an entire implied world of arbitrary injustice down with her. At her deathbed, as at Jesse's, McTell approaches transcendence through (as Manny Farber wrote of His Girl Friday) a sort of voluptuous cynicism.

Delia, Delia, take no one's advice.
Last word I heard her say was: "Jee-zus Christ!"